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The publication of H.M. Scott’s The Rise of the Eastern Powers marks the culmination of three decades of distinguished scholarship in international history from the Seven Years War to the American Revolution. It is, as we might expect, an elegant and learned book, and its significance is apparent from the outset.

In 221 BCE the state of Qin eliminated the last of its rivals, putting an end to centuries' long endemic warfare of the Warring States (Zhanguo, 453-221 BCE) age. The First Emperor (Qin Shi Huangdi, r.

This substantial volume is about more and less than the title indicates. Jill Harsin, known to specialists of nineteenth-century France for her earlier book, Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France (Princeton University Press; Princeton, 1985) has here produced a detailed narrative of the role of Paris artisans in revolution and popular unrest between 1830 and 1848.

s the deft pun in the title reminds us, one of the ways in which nations were both imagined and institutionalised in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was through the conscripting of young men into the army. The ways in which they were called up, selected, trained and led, and the arrangements made for their families left behind deeply affected the nature of nationhood.

With hostilities in the Second South African War spanning the period from 1899 to 1902, with the result that Boer War centenaries have been falling thick and fast for the last couple of years, it is not altogether surprising that in recent times books on this conflict have been appearing at a furious rate.

I know from my own research into the pre-First World War activities of the British military attachés in Berlin just how difficult it is to find archival material that illuminates the role of these elusive soldier-diplomats.(1) Not only did few of these individuals keep extensive collections of private papers, but the War Office, taking the view that intelligence materi

On 13 April 1204 the western or Latin armies participating in the Fourth Crusade conquered Constantinople, the capital of Byzantium. The approaching 800th anniversary of that event has generated renewed interest in the background, context and impact of that crusade, expressed in several new studies and in conferences.

Götz Aly’s and Susanne Heim’s Architects of Annihilation is a translation of the authors’ Vordenker der Vernichtung. Auschwitz und die deutschen Pläne für eine neue europäische Ordnung (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe), first published in 1991. The alteration to the title may be designed to emphasise the authors’ argument that there was a rational purpose behind the Holocaust.